“You’ve met my cousin Buck,” he said to me.

The man shook my hand. As he looked at me, his face told me absolutely nothing.

“I seem to remember,” I said.

Vinnie introduced me around to the rest of the room. It was all a blur after the first three or four names. There was a pot of coffee brewing in one of those big machines you see in restaurants. Another half-empty pot was keeping warm on the top burner. Without saying a word, one of Vinnie’s uncles poured me a cup.

“Your mother is in the bedroom,” Buck said to Vinnie. “She wants to see you.”

Vinnie asked me to wait out here in the kitchen. He went down the hallway like a man walking his last mile.

A couple more kids ran into the room and around the table. A woman yelled at them, while another woman right next to her gently rocked a baby in her arms. That baby could obviously sleep through anything.

One man broke open a pack of cigarettes and passed them around. Soon the air was filling up with smoke. Nobody looked at me. Not once.

I shifted back and forth on my feet, looked out the window at the cold, hard ground in the backyard. The telephone rang. A man picked it up. One of Vinnie’s cousins-not Buck, but some other cousin whose name I wouldn’t have remembered for a million dollars. He turned his back to me and talked in a low voice.

This is what Vinnie left, I thought. A house like this, on land owned by the tribe. All this family around him. Even if he lived in another house on the reservation, the family would be there. Maybe not all at once like this, but they’d come, one by one, every single day. That’s the way it works here. Your door is always open. Some days, I thought it was a great thing. It was something I envied. Today it was making me dizzy.

Vinnie moved off the rez, and his family still hadn’t accepted it. Hell, maybe they blamed me for it, like I was the one who kept him there. Move up to Paradise, Vinnie, away from your family. Buy your own land, build your own cabin. Live there all by yourself like a lonely white man.